As a fervent advocate of AVENGED SEVENFOLD for the last 8 years I should be pleased with the success they achieved because the deserved it for all the time while they were climbing slowly but surely the ladder of popularity. I’m not that pleased though. I’m even a little bit disappointed. Why? Because their unconditional market success (Album number 1 in The US and UK) came along with the most boring, straightforward and in a sense dull album they could produce at this point of their career. This doesn’t mean that “Hail To The King” is not the right move in the perfect timing, but as we all know, every right move has at least several alternatives.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD chose the easiest possible way - big arena drums, simplified songs and easy choruses, that you can sing along with even if you hadn’t hear the tunes before. In fact I am the last person on Earth who has anything against the big sound and simple but effective song structures. What’s more, I’m not one of those people who hate DEF LEPPARD’s “Hysteria” (quite the contrary, I loved that album); neither do I have anything against the big arena anthems of AC/DC. I do not despise the Black album with some kind of elitist condescendence, but who needs an AVENGED SEVENFOLD version of it in 2013? It seems a lot of people do. I don’t.

For the most part “Hail To The King” is exactly a remake, a new version- from the smell of  “Enter Sandman” coming from the riffs of the opener “Shepherd Of Fire”  through the haunting similarities between “This Means War” and “Sad But True” all the way to the insipid ballad “Crimson Day”, which  is gasping for breath when compared to “Seize The Day” from “City Of Evil” (2005) or “So Far Away” from “Nightmare” (2010). It’s embarrassing, at least for me, that some chorus parts sound the same way (“Shepherd Of Fire”, Hail To The King”, “This Means War”) and could even replace each other. The overwhelming mid tempo trips the album up and suffocates it (“Requiem” is a perfect example, not to mention the American Latin in the beginning) and when it doesn’t, some really crap songs begin to appear, like “Doing Time”, which one can rate as passable only if one hasn’t heard “It’s So Easy” by G’n’R.  I will skip the MAIDEN tribute in “Coming Home” (the chorus, the guitar solos and the bass line during the verse) because despite that, it’s one of the good songs here. “Heretic” is also passable. The last ones, “Planets” and “Acid Rain” bring back the typical dramatic turns in AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s music, but are actually miles away from the epic numbers like “Tonight The World Dies” and “Fiction” from “Nightmare” for example or “A Little Piece Of Heaven” from their self-titled albumq released in 2007.

Don’t get me started on the question whether the new direction is in fact a result of the lack of the late Rev’s songwriting talent or not, but the conclusion I drew is quite obvious and as I already said, I can’t deny the market values of  “Hail To King”, but this album is for people who don’t know or haven’t been contemporaries of the big arena rock era that AVENGED SEVENFOLD robbed insolently and blatantly.